Mary Poovey is Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English. Her primary scholarly work focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, history, and culture, although she has also published on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, the history of literary criticism, feminist theory, and economic history. Her two most recent books, A History of the Modern Fact and Genres of the Credit Economy, examine the emergence of the modern disciplines. In them, she argues that literary study acquired the rudiments of its modern form through a process of generic differentiation that distinguished between modes of writing about value. Her current work focuses on financial crises, both past and present.

Areas of Research/InterestVictorian Literature and Culture, Economic history of Great Britain and History of Financial Institutions